As the Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival gets set to celebrate its 10th anniversary this June, the influential festie is taking a hybrid of what they do each year in
Tom Hamilton is an amazing and underappreciated songwriter. While his work in Brothers Past and American Babies has steadily produced memorable hook after memorable melody across a diverse range of musical styles (from electro jam to indie-electro brooding to pastoral country rock) his name is not particularly well known. Hamilton’s penchant for producing a majestic elegance inside all his musical voices is second to none and on his new American Babies release, Flawed Logic, he further cements his reputation as major talent.
“Why don’t you do more Cover Wars that feature vocal harmonies?” I was asked last week. A great question, and obviously the motivation for this week’s selection. Helplessly Hoping is a track from the 1969 self-titled debut album from Crosby, Stills & Nash. The song makes heavy use of alliteration, a device that Stephen Stills – who wrote the song – humorously points out at the trio’s performance at Woodstock (which was the band’s only second live performance). After Graham Nash says it’s one of “one of the best ever written”, Stills quickly says into the microphone, “Helplessly Hoping Her Helicopter Hovers Nearby”.
The Contestants:
Leading off this week we’ve got the Cover Wars debut of Acoustic Syndicate, a band from North Carolina known for their strong harmonies. Source: 12-28-2002
[audio:https://glidemag.wpengine.com/hiddentrack/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/acoustichelpless.mp3]READ ON for more covers of Helplessly Hoping…
Today we introduce a new column called A Memory of Music put together by HT’s Photo Editor, Jeremy Gordon. Each month, Jeremy will compile a collection of his favorite shots along with the story behind the photos…
[Anders Osborne w/ Stanton Moore Trio, photo by Jeremy Gordon]
The first photo comes from the Brooklyn Bowl, where Anders Osborne shared the bill with the Stanton Moore Trio in front of a packed house. The band continued down to New Orleans for the Crescent City Blues & BBQ Festival where Stanton Moore tabbed the talented Scott Metzger to join up for the rest of the tour. As Scott explains, “When Stanton calls, no matter how early in the morning, you answer the phone.”
[Lotus w/ Max Weinberg, photo by Matthew Balch]
While some sit-ins require hours of planning to happen, others occur more spontaneously. As Lotus prepared to take the stage at the Westcott Theater in Syracuse, NY, E Street Band – and former Conan O’Brien drummer – Max Weinberg was in town to give a keynote speech at the Music Industry Conference. Well, Lotus’s tour manager saw him back stage, Max asked about sitting in with the band and voila. You can check the audio and video from the night here and here.
READ ON for more of the debut installment of AMoMusic…
The nature of this weekly feature is that it highlights the quick turnaround of recordings made of live concerts. As the years have gone on, it has become easier to turn around these tapes faster and faster. And with our point-and-shoot cameras getting better every year, it doesn’t take a whole lot of effort to shoot some good video and upload it to YouTube. What is really fucking impressive about this week’s selections is that there are two different pro-shot videos officially released to accompany our audio. And one of them took place two days ago!
[Thanks to NeilyBoy for this week’s photo]
And we continue to take all the selected tracks, normalize them, create some simple fades and put it into one easy to download MP3 for you.
Click here to download the Last Week’s Sauce Podcast
Artist & Title: American Babies – Winter War Games
Date & Venue: 2010-08-08 House of Blues – Atlantic City, NJ
Taper & Show Download: Unknown
In this era of frequently selling live concerts over the Internet, the freely available SBD patch is becoming somewhat of a rarity. So I was excited to see this show up with the SBD source on the Live Music Archive as I did my weekly search for audio from the previous week. It’s been a busy summer for Tom Hamilton & American Babies playing shows with Big Light, Tea Leaf Green, and Umphrey’s McGee. This track, was released on the Weight of the World – EP in April of this year. American Babies next play the Liberate Music & Arts Festival in Sheldon, VT on Friday August 20th.
[audio:https://glidemag.wpengine.com/hiddentrack/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/absauce.mp3]READ ON for tracks from Gov’t Mule, Phish, and Umphrey’s McGee.